Why is Link Building Still Important to your Website and Business?

Rebecca D'CunhaPosted on 12th Aug 2013

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Although there are still a few businesses out there that haven’t seen the benefit of going online, the majority now provide both an online and offline presence, or service for their customers. Having an integrated online and offline marketing strategy ensures that your business reaches the maximum amount of customers possible and increases brand awareness.

Websites enable customers to attain products or information in a straightforward manner, and one of the main reasons customers visit websites in the first place is the speed in which an end result can be achieved. With this in mind, ranking well in Google will ensure your current customers and potential customers will find your website quickly resulting in more business for you. Along with creating great highly beneficial content on your website, one of the best ways to achieve a high ranking within the search engine results pages (SERP’s) is to build the right opportunity for your website to grow a great and natural link profile.

At first, hyperlinks (links) were the main way websites were all interconnected through HTML (code) which meant that users could navigate easily through one website to another, clicking from hyperlink to hyperlink in order to find what they wanted. The more popular a site, the more hyperlinks there were to it. The search engines use an algorithm to assess the amount of links to the website and then increased its positions within its SERP for highly relevant terms so more people could find it easily. Things have changed drastically since the launch of Search Engines and so have the way in which we create links.

Based on this knowledge you could be forgiven for thinking that you should build as many links as possible to your website and that’s it, job done, you now have a high ranking in Google. Unfortunately it isn’t that simple. One of the many elements within the ranking process is that all links have different values depending on the authority of the website that is linking to you. For example, having a link from Sky is of much higher value than having a link from your neighbour’s part time blog. Therefore you may see instances where one of your competitors has 100 links however you could easily outrank them by gaining 50 links that have a higher value.

At the moment this is sounds easy right, just get high authority websites to link to yours and that is it. However, there are many other elements to take into account, not least Google’s Penguin updates to contend with. These updates are released to penalise any website that has unnatural links, which is what Google defines as links which have been placed for SEO purposes or are arguably paid for links.

Therefore the best way to create a natural link profile is by creating interesting and engaging content that others can share on their own websites, therefore linking back to you.
Creating content which answers a need or a question, which offers valuable information or insight will motivate the reader to share, bookmark and link to your content – which should be your number one goal when looking to creating a natural link profile.

At Gravytrain we understand that for many businesses, gaining high value links and creating engaging content can be overly time consuming which is why we offer our services from a dedicated content and SEO team. Having a good link profile is still one of the most important factors in being highly visible within the search engines and will enable users to find your website for not only your brand but keywords relating to your product, industry or services.